1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to telephony-related enhanced services, and more specifically to the generation and delivery of customized ring-back tones blending a plurality of content streams in real time.
2. Background Art
Innovative ways of delivering digital content to end users connected to an existing communications network (e.g. the Internet, the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), a wireless communication network etc.) is an area with tremendous commercial potential. Tailoring digital content according to an end user's preference for enhanced communication experience has opened up new avenues of revenue generation for service providers.
Previously, when a calling party initiated a call to connect to a called party, the calling party would typically hear a traditional ring-back tone (“tring-tring”) or a beeping sound in the time period before the called party answered. Since then, ring-back tones have developed from simple sounds to songs and other audio files, such as stereo MP3 files. More recently, pre-produced video clips are being streamed to the calling party, in the time period between a call set up and an answer. This is known as a video ring-back tone, where the calling party not only hears a ring-back tone, but also sees an accompanying video clip on his/her handset screen. The video clip may include real video data—not just animated pictures.
Service providers also use audio/video ring-back tones for self promotion, or offer a variety of distinctive ring-back tones to be purchased by the called party, who subscribes to a premium service. The premium service is often known as Colorful Ring-Back Tone (CRBT) service or Personalized Ring-Back Tone (PRBT) service.
Although CRBT is available as a premium service to a subscriber, the deficiency in the current approach is that the called subscriber can only select a single content stream or pre-merged multiple content streams to be played as ring-back tone. In the case where multiple files or streams are involved, the files or streams are either played consecutively or if required to play simultaneously, they are mixed prior to storing in the content server. Unless the service provider creates the content in a studio earlier, which is a very expensive approach, there is no seamless experience to the caller. For example if a called subscriber wants a caller to hear a pre-recorded greeting as well as a piece of music, then current CRBT implementations play the greeting followed by the music. The transition between the two contents may be quite abrupt, such that the caller may get confused regarding the status of the call. This abrupt transition does not provide a satisfying experience to the caller, which may be a cause of concern particularly for business enterprises, who aim to provide a high level of customer satisfaction.
There are existing implementations where multiple content streams or files are mixed offline and then played as a single stream in real time. A deployment based on offline content mixing has severe limitations in a number of scenarios. For example, this scheme does not work when one of the content streams is a real-time stream coming from a third party server (e.g. a radio stream). Additionally, this scheme does not allow subscribers to select random contents from a jukebox library. This approach is very resource-heavy and not practical to implement when multiple parties are involved in selection of the content (for example when a service provider or an employer wants their signature tune as back-ground to the CRBT subscriber's greeting), or content needs to be customized for each caller or needs to be altered depending on the current time or date. All these features require hundreds of mixed files to be created in advance putting undue pressure on the processing and storage capacity. The present invention described in this application removes these constraints by mixing the content streams in real time.
With the growing popularity of CRBT services, especially among the commercially pivotal demographic groups of subscribers, service providers need distinctive features to enhance the appeal and utility of CRBT services without incurring excessive charges to the subscribers. What is therefore needed is a system and method to seamlessly mix multiple content streams in real time in a ring-back tone.